Two announcements in three weeks put AI-native ERP squarely in the mid-market channel’s path. Here’s what to make of them.
The EY–Rillet Alliance
In late April, EY announced a formal alliance with Rillet, the AI-native ERP platform, targeting companies that have outgrown mid-market ERP and want something more modern and audit-ready. The pitch is distinctive: risk and controls are not a separate workstream but embedded in the transformation from day one, combining EY’s finance advisory and controls capability with Rillet’s real-time general ledger architecture.
“When AI is baked into the accounting logic from the ground up, controls don’t just keep pace — they become stronger, more continuous and more defensible under audit.”
— Nic Kopp, CEO, Rillet
Pine Was Already There
Three weeks earlier, Pine Services Group, which owns some of the largest Acumatica and Sage practices in North America, spanning 10,000+ mid-market customers, announced it had incubated Raiz, Rillet’s first dedicated VAR. Raiz is Pine’s first-ever AI-native business, founded inside Evergreen’s portfolio in 2025. Its promise: Rillet implementations in weeks, not the six-to-twelve months typical of legacy ERP projects.
The signal here is harder to ignore than a typical vendor alliance. Pine isn’t a startup; it’s one of the most active acquirers of traditional ERP VARs in the channel. The decision to build a parallel AI-native practice inside that portfolio reflects where Pine’s leadership believes the market is heading.
What It Means for Your Practice
The EY-Rillet alliance creates a top-down motion: CFOs who trust EY for audit and advisory may now receive an AI-native ERP recommendation from the same relationship. The Pine-Raiz incubation is a from-within hedge by the very holding companies acquiring traditional VAR practices. Together, they form a two-channel pincer on the mid-market finance transformation opportunity.
Three questions worth raising with your team now:
Is your ERP publisher investing in AI-native architecture or AI-native marketing? There’s a real difference between rebuilding the general ledger for real-time AI and bolting features onto a batch-processing core.
Which of your customers are in the Rillet target zone? High-growth companies, multi-entity structures, and organizations approaching the ceiling of their current ERP are exactly who Rillet, Raiz, and EY are going after.
What happens to your margins if implementation timelines compress? If weeks-not-months holds at scale, services revenue per deal shrinks. The time to rethink the mix toward managed services, analytics, and vertical IP is before that pressure arrives.
The Bottom Line
Rillet has 400 customers, and the mid-market installed base is large and sticky. This isn’t an overnight disruption. But EY’s credibility and Pine’s channel reach are not trivial. VARs who treat this as background noise risk finding their best prospects captured by a faster, better-funded competitor ecosystem. The time to build a perspective — and a strategy — is now.
Read the press release: EY announces alliance with Rillet to provide AI-native finance transformation – with risk and controls built in
